Custom query_posts() parameter

Question

I'm adding voting features to a theme. Visitors can vote posts Up or Down. I created a table for storing number of votes for each post and that works fine. Now I'm trying to sort posts by their votes.

I have "voted up" and "voted down" links. For instance, when you click on "voted up" a new parameter sort=up is passed in the URL.

In the loop if the parameter exists and is = "up" I want to loop posts with votes up.

wpdb->get_results("SELECT post_id, FROM $wpdb->votes WHERE up > 5");

This is where I want to use something like query_posts('sort=up') before the loop. My question is, how to I create the custom "sort" parameter?

Answer 1

If you have your data in separate table adding support for it in query is somewhat messy. Basically you will need to filter posts_where and posts_join to modify raw SQL query so that your custom table is joined and checked against your custom values.

As per [faster :)] anu's suggestion it would make sense to store values in Custom Fields and use Custom Field Parameters (related to Orderby, but not same thing) in query.

Answer 2

I'm pretty sure that the only way of doing this using the orderby parameter is to store the vote values in a custom field.

From the Codex (http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/query_posts#Orderby_Parameters)

OrderBy Parameters

• orderby=meta_value Note: A meta_key=keyname must also be present in the query. Note also that the sorting will be alphabetical
• orderby=meta_value_num - Order by numeric meta value (available with Version 2.8)